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This article seeks to illustrate how social commonalities between employees and their customers often result in customers believing that they are entitled to discounts in retail settings.

This study employs survey methodology to reveal the extent to which various social commonalities between customers and service providers encourage customers to believe that they are entitled to financial discounts.

The findings show that commonalities may cause customers to adhere to narcissism – that is, many customers may expect discounts even when they know that employees may jeopardize their jobs by providing them.

Customer relationships dramatically change with commonalities, as customers believe that social relationships propel them to “best customer status” and that they are entitled to discounts.

Customers who become increasingly connected with employees expect relational benefits that usually require time to develop. Retailers that encourage their employees to develop social media bonds with their customers must realize that customers desire to be financially rewarded for maintaining these linkages.

This work reveals that customers who maintain social commonalities with employees expect to receive some type of financial benefit from doing so.

Researchers have explored the extent to which consumers belonging to minority, ethnic, marginalized, and sub‐cultural groups experience discrimination in retail settings. This study aims to explore the converse of retail racism – namely, reverse retail discrimination. The work shows that gay men in the USA and Turkish people in Germany often secure relational benefits, or “family allowances,” from like employees, for no reason other than that they share a socio‐collective trait.

The study employs grounded theory methodology to put forth a framework regarding five types of family allowances. The framework emerges from two in‐depth interview studies conducted with gay and Turkish people. A third qualitative study reveals insights into how majority groups view family allowances.

This study reveals that consumers who share ethnic and sexual orientation traits with like employees obtain family allowances; these are complementary products, monetary discounts, service improvements, customer comfort, and the sharing of information. The study also reveals that consumers from majority groups realize that reverse retail discrimination exists; however, they react negatively to having their thoughts confirmed.

This study is limited in that respondents were gay men and Turkish people. Studies are needed to further develop understanding of reverse retail discrimination and to investigate the extent to which managers realize that this phenomenon occurs.

Managers should realize that the potential for reverse discrimination exists and that discriminatory victims may become discriminatory agents.

This study develops the concept of family allowances. In addition, the study expands knowledge regarding a new type of marketplace discrimination.

Library technology has been moving towards SaaS and cloud‐based services for some time. Yet the cornerstone of the library collection, namely the ILS, remains largely on separate islands with limited capacity for interoperability, requiring alternate layers for discovery to ingest and index their content. How ILS providers react to this challenge and how libraries themselves respond to it will determine the degree to which such new technologies can take hold. Ultimately, a shift towards a more unified model is perhaps inevitable. It is the means by which that is achieved which remains debatable. This paper seeks to address these issues.

With the onset of new management solutions such as Alma, Intota and Worldshare, the prospect of moving the management of the full breadth of the library collection into the cloud has become a possibility. There is, however, no clear picture as to whether this represents the future of libraries as a whole.

Ultimately, a shift towards a more unified model is perhaps inevitable. It is the means by which that is achieved which remains debatable. This paper provides an open‐ended perspective on the possibilities and perils of the cloud in the library industry.

This paper provides an open‐ended perspective on the possibilities and perils of the cloud in the library industry.

Considers cases of new product launches where market analysis suggests that the product will fail but when pushed through by an entrepreneur proves to be a commercial success. Describes the process of product introduction to fill unrecognized needs as Ready‐Fire‐Aim, since the market can only be appreciated after the launch. Concludes that product champions must be in a corporate culture that allows risk, and should be prepared to risk their job on a risky venture.

Vector autoregressions (VAR) combined with Minnesota-type priors are widely used for macroeconomic forecasting. The fact that strong but sensible priors can substantially improve forecast performance implies VAR forecasts are sensitive to prior hyperparameters. But the nature of this sensitivity is seldom investigated. We develop a general method based on Automatic Differentiation to systematically compute the sensitivities of forecasts – both points and intervals – with respect to any prior hyperparameters. In a forecasting exercise using US data, we find that forecasts are relatively sensitive to the strength of shrinkage for the VAR coefficients, but they are not much affected by the prior mean of the error covariance matrix or the strength of shrinkage for the intercepts.

This paper explores how consumer psychographics impact responses to sales promotions (SPs), and specifically whether equity sensitivity (ES) moderates attitudes towards sales promotion in the retail purchase experience (PE).

The study examines data from a survey of 284 Hong Kong consumers, using a shopping mall-intercept method. Every third person walking past the researchers was asked to participate in the survey. After obtaining their permission, those agreeing to take part in the study were surveyed either inside or outside of the shopping complex. The face-to-face intercept surveying method also increases confidence in sample and response reliability.

The study finds that ES has a significant positive relationship with evaluations of the retail PE. Consumers identified as “Benevolents” were significantly more positive towards SPs and reported significantly higher satisfaction with the PE. In contrast, consumers identified as “Entitled” were less positive towards SP and less satisfied with the PE. In addition, noncash SPs significantly positively influenced Benevolents' PE.

The current study extends and expands equity theory and ES research by applying these concepts to consumer SPs. The study is limited to an examination of common consumer purchases, across different product categories and SP types. While this allows us to examine the relationship between SP attitudes, ES and purchase satisfaction, future comparisons between individual sales promotion techniques (SPTs) and specific consumer profiles are recommended.

From a retail perspective, it is important to understand individual differences and what influences and motivates the consumers' retail PE. Retail managers are advised to track customer purchases and satisfaction levels linked to SPs as this would allow for the identification of which customers are more likely to fit the Entitled or Benevolent psychological profiles and predict their likely responses to SP offers.

To date, there has been little research on individual psychological differences between consumers when offered SPs at retail stores. The current study contributes to the marketing literature by extending the price fairness equity model to the retail PE, thereby addressing a prominent gap in the literature.